Students led by faculty members Alexis Rochas and Darin Johnstone at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) will design and build a Thanksgiving table that will stretch as long as LA City Hall is tall for a celebration of the holiday, of architecture and the community. A festive event dubbed Thanksgiving Pie Shuffle will be hosted at SCI-Arc on Wednesday, November 24, at noon, when the giant table will be set with 500 individual pies for the school’s students, faculty, staff and guests to share with family and friends or donate to the Midnight Mission.
“There’s no project too simple we can’t make more complicated,” said SCI-Arc distinguished faculty member and founding student Michael Rotondi announcing the plan to build the ultra-long table.
This is the second year the event is held at the school housed in a former Downtown LA freight depot—which is itself a quarter-mile long. The Thanksgiving Pie Shuffle is presented by SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss and the leadership of the school. Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso will address students, faculty and guests in the opening of the event.
2 Comments
Just to revise this slightly, SCI-Arc has long made celebrating Thanksgiving (perhaps not with a pie shuffle design build) one of the many traditions the school is unofficially known for. The Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holiday, the faculty, administration and students all contributed for a thanksgiving lunch as a way to allow those students who couldn't go home for the holidays to have a nice meal with their "extended" family AND as a way to share an American custom with the many students who attend SCI-Arc from all over the world. I always credited the tradition with Bill Simonian, one of SCI-Arc's co-founders and while I was a student, we had the privilege to invite Bill Simonian to speak informally at the lunch and reflect on his long career at SCI-Arc.
I do hope that they are continuing with this tradition and haven't just replaced it in whole with this design-build project. SCI-Arc students already have a bad enough vending machine diet- a Thanksgiving of nothing but pie is going ensure that some students graduate with more than just a diploma.
CC,,
Yes SCI-Arc started out very communal in food and lodging. The Annual all-you-can eat Beaux Arts dinner and ball; Once a week pot-luck dinners with faculty; Friday BBQs in front of the school. When the school became a way for international students to get into the US the cuisine benefited. SCI Arc had the best food at this time: Persian dishes stewing, Nigerian, Chinese cooking... I remember escorting a well known international architect around the cubes and he remarked about all the different cooking fragrance. SCIARC downstairs was was more like a bazaar.
Santa Monica SCI_ARC had a shower and a population of up to fifty students living and working at the school: Some in mega-structure rhombus hex-pods; More in the "cubes" which was the school cubical scaffolding system; others in trailers in the parking lot; temp shelters, anywhere; sleeping beds pulled from under the desks. Students had their own mailboxes made from stacked tubes
One time there was an election investigation complaint by the Republican Party on why so many, fifty the investigator said, registered democrats at this industrial zoned, which was SCI-ARC's address. I danced and painted a story about hard working architecture students living eating working on projects without sleep. That ended the investigation.
eric chavkin
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